As COVID-19 cases continue to increase across the country, there is a concern about the extent to which this pandemic will affect students. Since March 2020, schools transitioned to a distance-learning format, which unintentionally forced parents into new teaching roles as proxy educators. In this brief, we explore the association between distance learning and the mental health of proxy educators. We find that parents with children who struggled with distance learning experienced elevated mental distress. Given the relationship between teacher burnout and student outcomes, we argue the importance of supporting parents during this time to improve students’ schooling.

Evidence is emerging of the pandemic disproportionately impacting communities of color. This study investigates mental health distress among essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic across race and ethnicity. We evaluate individual responses to the patient health questionnaire and general anxiety disorder questionnaire using a unique, nationally representative data set. Our findings suggest that essential healthcare workers reported the highest rates of mental health distress at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. However, when evaluated across race and ethnicity, we find that Black essential healthcare workers disproportionately report symptoms of anxiety; while, Hispanic essential healthcare workers disproportionately report symptoms of depression. Additionally, we find that being a Black or Hispanic essential nonhealthcare worker is associated with higher levels of distress related to anxiety and depression. These findings highlight the additional dimensions to which Black and Hispanic Americans may be disproportionately affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Furthermore, it calls into question how the essential worker classification, compounded by US unemployment policies, is potentially amplifying the mental health distress experienced by workers.

With the recent escalation in interior immigration enforcement across the United States, immigrant and U.S.-born children are increasingly exposed to coercive measures that have been shown to disrupt their development. This study examines the relationship between immigration-related arrests and the educational outcomes of Hispanics—a group that is overwhelmingly targeted by immigration authorities. Using data on the number of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests at the Metropolitan Statistical Area level, we estimate the impact of immigration enforcement on Hispanics’ school enrollment. We find that increases in the arrest rate are accompanied by substantial declines in enrollment among Hispanic youth, including U.S.-born, foreign-born, and individuals in mixed-status families. Additionally, we do not find evidence of this relationship among other racial/ethnic groups, suggesting that the impact is concentrated among Hispanic individuals. Our results advance our understanding of the unintended consequences of immigration enforcement on educational outcomes and show that ethnicity is a crucial factor in this process.

There is no shortage of evidence documenting glaring disparities on important socioeconomic and health indicators between White and Black Americans. Persistent racial disparities are the consequence of a historic system of structural racism. Given ongoing inequities in nearly every realm of American life, we aim to calculate the contemporary cost of racial inequity. We contribute to a growing body of literature concerning the “hidden cost” of being Black by employing a novel methodological approach and centering a paradigm of intersectionality ( Crenshaw, 1991 ; Shapiro, 2004 ). Specifically, we account for the disparities in health and income between Blacks and Whites by using the compensating and equivalent surplus frameworks to calculate willingness to accept (WTA) and willingness to pay (WTP) estimates. We estimate the WTP to avoid the disparity in health, income, and wellbeing between Black and White Americans, to be between approximately $38,000 and $45,000 per year per person using the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System as well as the General Social Survey, respectively. These estimates can be interpreted as the annual willingness to pay by an average White person to avoid the disparities in income and health experienced by the average Black person.

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